Page 37 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
He climbed the stone steps on the balls of his feet, the Luger at the ready, his index finger just outside the trigger guard. Bell suspected that if anyone slept in the building it would be on the upper floors, but still he kept to the shadows when he reached the main level. A single lamp had been left on, a beacon in an otherwise inky black room. He listened. All he heard was silence, as if the thick walls absorbed sound the way they blocked light.
Then came the merest whisper of something. Not so much of a sound but a lack of utter silence. Bell crouched, turning his head to determine the direction it was coming from, if it indeed was a sound and not his imagination. Then came a barely perceptible glow from the big staircase up to the castle’s upper stories. A few long seconds later, a guard carrying a feeble flashlight glided down the stairs, the leather of a rifle sling chafing against his jacket being the only sound he made. At the base of the stairs, he paused, training the light left and right.
Bell was hidden behind a desk. Not the best spot if the guard performed a systematic search, but good enough if he just had a quick look around. He kept his breathing shallow and even.
The soldier started ambling about, not looking for anything in particular, but weaving about the large open space as if he had a few minutes to kill. He even started whistling some Germanic opera Bell thought he recognized. The guard approached where Bell lay hidden, his light and gaze swiveling back and forth. Bell tensed, ready for a surprised exclamation when he was discovered. But he wasn’t. The man passed close enough to Bell that, had he wanted to, he could have grabbed his leg.
He continued walking around the great chamber for another couple of minutes and then left via the wicket gate cut into one of the massive main doors.
Bell let five minutes trickle by before going back down to get the others. He had been right in scouting ahead. Despite their best efforts, the airmen made more noise than the brass section of an orchestra as they crossed the empty hall.
Bell had them pause at the door. He opened it slowly, staying low so that anyone watching wasn’t likely to notice him. The vast courtyard appeared deserted under the silver light of a waxing moon. The castle complex’s thick perimeter walls looked black and as capable today of protecting those inside as they had when they were built a thousand years ago.
He kept watch for several minutes. There didn’t appear to be any sentries on patrol or anyone up on the walls looking inside. This far back from the lines, the Germans must have felt they were completely safe.
Bell took his first step outside when a teen dressed in chef’s whites appeared from around the keep’s corner. He and Bell looked at each other in surprised confusion, neither expecting to see anyone out in the darkness. Then the cook’s assistant noticed the gun in Bell’s hand and recognized that he was in danger.
He turned on his heel and took off like a frightened rabbit, vanishing back around the corner like a white wraith. Bell had no choice but to take off after him. If the cook raised an alarm he and his companions were as good as dead. Captain Holmes had been close enough to Bell to see what happened and took charge of the escape. They had always intended on stealing a vehicle, so with Bell in hot pursuit of the cook, he led the other flyers toward the motor pool.
Bell swept around the corner of the keep, moving as fast as he could. He admitted to himself that he wasn’t in top form, especially with his kidney still aching, but he ran with a desperation born ofnecessity. The cook was ahead, but not really pulling away despite his youth. He had an awkward gait that cost him some speed.
The cook crossed from the shadow of the massive keep to the side of another stone building that looked to be the same age as the rest of the compound. His arms were pumping and his feet slapping at the hard ground as he continued to flee in terror. Thankfully it hadn’t occurred to him that he should be shouting his lungs out right about now.
There was a break between two buildings ahead, an extremely narrow alley, a remnant of stoneworkers being given just enough room to erect a second structure as close as possible to the first. Such alleys were common all over Europe.
The cook hooked an arm around the edge of the wall of the alley to turn himself down it as quickly as possible. Bell was perhaps five seconds back. He took the sharp corner as though it were a racing line on a track and shaved another second off the fleeing chef’s lead. Bell’s shoulders were a hand’s span away from either stone wall, which rose three stories and almost looked like they met above, as it was so dark.
He was grateful to be chasing a chef in white and not a soldier in a dark uniform.
Ahead, the cook reached an unseen ramp because he started rising up from the alley floor in an odd, jerky fashion. The ramp seemed to slow him because Bell caught up in just a couple of long-legged paces. It was then that he realized there was no ramp. The young conscript was climbing the walls using a foot on each side to propel himself upward. Bell saw the man had a destination in mind. There was a window opening halfway up that was a shade darker than the stone.
The teen had momentum to help him make the climb. Bell didn’t have time to backtrack, so he shoved the Luger behind his back, found a toehold against the mortared stone wall on his right, and used his hands as a brace as he lifted himself off the ground. He found a spot higher up on the left wall and repeated the process, bracing himself with the muscles of his legs while maintaining balance with his hands.
Above him, the soldier was nearing the window. He’d run out of momentum by this point and was forced to climb like Bell. He might have been younger, but Bell had him on strength and sheer determination. Bell found perfect holds each time for his feet as though he could see what he was doing rather than making the climb by feel. It was obvious the cook had done this before, a game he’d likely played with others stationed at the base, but fear made him cautious and Bell was gaining on him once again.
The kid reached the window. It was wooden framed and from the outside he could swing it open toward him. The frame barely missed the opposite wall. He slithered through less than fifteen seconds ahead of his pursuer. Bell redoubled his effort, taking higher steps each time. He had no idea what lay on the other side of the window and needed to prevent the young soldier from taking advantage. He ignored the burning pain in his thighs and the scraped skin off his hands and kept climbing.
In his haste, the cook hadn’t closed and locked the window, maybe it couldn’t be. It didn’t matter. Unlike the German, who’d crawled through the window like a snake, Bell kicked off the opposite wall with everything he had in order to launch himself into the building.
And he nearly fell to his death.
The planks of the second-story floor had been removed at somepoint in history, so the building was now an open-plan space with soot-blackened wooden columns and a lattice of massive joists where the second floor had been. Bell had landed on a narrow shelf that ringed the building some eighteen feet above the floor and nearly rolled off. A few lights had been left on in what was obviously a large warehouse full of all manner of military supplies. Below the spot where he clutched at the shelf were stacks of razor wire in tightly coiled loops.
If the fall hadn’t broken his neck, he would have suffered the death of a thousand cuts.
Bell got to his feet. Like a tightrope walker, the chef was crossing the warehouse on the heavy beams that once supported the second floor, his arms out and his feet dancing like a gymnast’s. Bell considered using the Luger, as he suspected the thick stone walls would trap the sound, but didn’t know if there were others in the building.
He took off after the cook. Whenever he came to one of the vertical columns that barred his way, he had to stop, grab on to it with both hands, and feel around it with a foot. Once he found the next beam, he used his shoulders to pivot himself around the column and ran after the chef once again. Here he was slower than the cook, and any advantage that Bell had made during the climb soon evaporated.
At the next column, Bell tried to slingshot around it using momentum and almost toppled from his perch into a bin of obsoletePickelhauben, the iconic spiked helmets the Germans issued their soldiers until they realized they were useless on the modern battlefield. He went back to his tried-and-true slower technique at the next column.
The kid had nearly reached the far wall. Bell didn’t see anything of note in that direction and wondered what the endgame of thischase would be. That’s when the chef came to a complete stop, looked back in Bell’s direction, and then allowed himself to topple backward off the beam, his arms outstretched. He looked like a falling crucifix.
He landed flat on a six-foot stack of mattresses for army cots. They more than absorbed the impact and he rolled off the mound with a cat’s agility. That was the game he and his buddies had invented—climb the alley walls and cross the warehouse in order to jump onto the mattresses. Young men would do anything to alleviate boredom. Hell, Bell had once stolen a train when he was about the same age as the cook.
Bell didn’t wait until he was directly over the mattresses. He leapt and rotated in mid-flight so that he landed on his back with enough force to launch him off again and back in pursuit.
The cook raced for a door that exited the building on the opposite side from the alley. He had to unlock it and Bell nearly got a hand on him, but he squirted through just beyond Bell’s fingers.
